


anchored at the bottom of the sea

by TheElusiveBadger



Series: The Heart of the Sea [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Allusions to Treasure Island, Brennan Jones is an Asshole, Captain Hook | Killian Jones Backstory, F/M, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Jones Brothers, The Princess Bride References, With Characters of the Same Age, jones family - Freeform, part of a series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-09-06 17:53:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8763034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveBadger/pseuds/TheElusiveBadger
Summary: The sea is dark and haunting and the siren call that drifts over the waves with a haunting melody will never leave the souls of the Jones' family. Sooner or later, they each find their way back home.





	

She is five the first time she drowns.

Sailors tell tales of burning lungs and fear, but she feels none of this. The water is a gentle friend against her skin, the embrace of kin, and her lungs feel as light and pleasant as a warm spring day. She sees nothing when strong arms pull her away from the reef and barely feels fingers pluck the seaweed from her hair. Muscle memory is all the awareness she has as she is lifted and carried, head rocking fast next to a thumping heart, through the streets and alleys and up to the temple dedicated to the gods.

The priestess that greets her father at the door with a shark smile has a voluptuous figure. Her breasts spill pass the silk of her gown, her neck rimmed with a seaweed choker, and there is a wretched look in her dark, black eyes. The little girl, lost in a daze and still filled with lungs of salt-water, does not notice this. Neither does her father, panicked as he is. 

“Can you help her?” he asks the priestess, as he lays his shaking daughter down on the altar. She is cold. As cold as ice and almost as blue. The child closes her eyes, longing to be back in the dark and the warmth of the sea floor. 

“The deep has already claimed her,” the priestess tells her father. Her voice sounds like the chirp of a dolphin to the little girl’s disoriented brain. “What price are you willing to pay?” 

“Anything,” her father replies. The answer of a desperate man. His wife is gone of the flux and he simply cannot comprehend more loss. He never sees the smirk that flits across the woman’s lovely face, nor hears the siren call of a thousand voices in his ears. All he sees is his daughter’s eyes blink open, as blue as the ocean that threatened her, and her pained grimace.

Then, she hears no more that night. 

In the morning, her father clutches her close with whispers and comfort and walks out of the temple ignorant of the future. 

  
  
  


 

She is eleven as she stands, still but raging inside, while the crew tosses her father’s corpse over the side of the ship. She is not dressed in a mourning dress or veil—in truth, she has none, for at three she decided  skirts drag underneath the water—but rather, a torn vest and breeches, her cotton white shirt still stained with brown blood from the coughs that wracked her father in his last days. The crew moves on as normal, as if their captain is still there, and as the first mate approaches her, she clenches her fist, nails digging crescent moons into her skin.  

“You are a traitor,” she spits as three men grab her and drag her to the other end of the ship. It’s docked outside her birth city, men and women rushing about buying fish and clams and crabs, ignoring the spectacle as she kicks and curses. There is a knife in her breeches, but bound as she is by men three times her size, the sharp blade she whittles every night might is as useful as a hairpin. 

The sun is shining bright over the blue sky, the breeze cool and light, but her hair has been pulled from its braids in the struggle. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches sight of the small cabin boy being dragged across the deck, boots scuffling across the loose floorboards her father never got around to fixing. They pop up and down under the sailors’ feet.

“No need to struggle, lass,” the first mate says. He stops the men and reaches down to grab her chin in his rough hands. There is sand between his fingers. “The city will take well care of you. It’s bad luck to have a woman aboard a ship.” 

“May Charybdis sink you and your bones be meat for giant squids,” she tells him. Her head snaps back as his hand connects with her cheek, and through the ringing of her ears she hears the cabin boy cry out. When her head settles, she looks to see the first mate is glaring. She meets his eyes with as straight a spine as she can. “This is my father’s ship,” she screams, looking to all of them. A few cannot meet her eyes and turn away in shame. More, however, stare at her emotionlessly. They are rough men. Murders and rapists and all manner of foul beasts. 

Before today, they were never hers to fear. 

“No, Miss Roberts,” the first mate tells her. With a dangerous smirk, he plucks her father’s hat from his belt. With a flourish, he puts it on his head. “This  _ was _ your father’s ship. And now it’s mine.” 

With a wave of his hand, she is tossed from the ship down the board that serves as a stair by the men caging her. An  _ oomph _ tells her that the cabin boy joins her a few seconds later. As she rears up from her knees, hand on her knife, he skirts forward to grab her. Although his arms are as skinny as hers, there are muscles there where she has none, and they bump and wrestle down the rest of the stair. 

“No,  _ mariquita _ ,” Juan tells her as he pulls her away. “Live to fight another day.” The words are as strange and foreign as the island he hails from to her, wrapping themselves around his lilting accent and obscuring their meaning with fog. “Come,” he says patiently, even as he winces with each step. There are several bruises she knows he will be nursing tonight. “We have to find food.” 

She follows him, baring her teeth at the disgusted looks that men and women throw them as they weave their way through the city. She’s not set foot here in years, and the house her mother reared her in has long since been lost to her memory. If she passes it now, she is unaware. The accent and language, similar in sound, are a distant cousin, yet it is the same brogue, a kind of throaty husk. She begins to fear moving further up and inland. She wants to hear the sound of the sea. 

Juan does not understand this. He is an urchin boy her father found in a far off port in a city of spice and red mountains making off with a nobleman’s good silver forks. He has fingers as quick as lightning and a mind with a keen ear for languages and facts and, as they duck into a dark alley, she sees he has picked several bits and bobbles as they walked. The tip of her dagger presses into her left thumb while she watches him wrap a piece of blue fabric over his hair and wrestle a long cloak over his body like a gown. 

At her look of confusion, he explains. “The priestesses give out food to beggars in most cities along the shore. But they rarely let in men.” 

She didn’t know this. She does not know what continent this is nor the name of the city. She recognizes it only from the dock, now. She could be surrounded by trees in the Enchanted Forest for all she knows and she feels a bubble of despair rush up past her voicebox and catch around her tongue. 

“It’s not fair,” she whispers with tears at the corners of her eyes. He reaches to squeeze her hand. “It’s not right.” 

“I know.” 

That night, in the safety of the temple, she stares at the white ceiling above her and thinks,  _ Mari _ . She smiles grimly. Her eyes are red and raw, but dry as dust.  _ Yes, that is who I am. The sea will always claim back what is hers. And so will I. _

  
  


 

They stay there for a month before they book passage on a ship bound to the south. She spends her days shucking clams on the docks for coin and he uses his wits to lift purses and ears to hear whispers. Her father’s ship is making a name for itself—and with it, his vile first mate. 

“He’s calling himself the Dread Pirate Roberts,” the former cabin boy tells her about three weeks in. The watchful eyes of the priestesses follow his every move, except a voluptuous woman with dark eyes. She stares at Mari with strange smiles. “Taken your father’s last name.” 

The port cities are the only places she knows where people, even peasants, carry two names. In villages and pastures in the Enchanted Forest, the idea of more than one is unheard of. The first mate came from a village landlocked by peaks and cliffs. He’d had no second name. In response, she spits at the floor and curses his  _ real _ name. 

For the next year, Mari and her friend sail along with the merchants in the vessel that takes them away. She dresses in breeches and tunics, and hides her growing breasts with strips of white cloth. She cuts off her long, sandy brown hair until it falls to just above her shoulders and puts it back into a simple ponytail. She still has freckles and a gap between her teeth, and she is skinny and tall enough that she passes easily as a boy. 

Juan is not particularly strong, and he is smaller than her, but he can read three languages and, in every port, he picks up even more. Sometimes, when he’s overtired, his words become a jumble of foreign sounds and poetic verse. She thinks it should make her feel small. She is not illiterate by any means, not like most girls born without benefit of noble birth, but the way his mind works leaves her behind in the drift. She feels no jealousy, though. She does not care enough about these things to contemplate that. 

Juan delights in their dealings. He wraps himself in their acts as fittingly as a coat and, more often than not, she plays the part of a mute whose only strength is her fists and her blade. She’s got a cutlass now, stolen off some drunk five ports back, and the captain’s been teaching her the art. Her strength is still poor, but her footwork on the rocking and swaying deck is great. 

“John,” he tells people when the crewmen flood into the whorehouses and inns at the ports. He smiles at them with his perfect white teeth and bouncy, black curls. Objectively, with all the budding awareness of a girl of twelve years, she knows that his face is arresting. Her friend captivates them even as he relieves them of their earnings. 

“Mari,” she calls herself and misses the seashell pins she used to braid in her long hair. They look at her with pity when no words follow and usually drift away. Many times, as her friend captures an audience with some tall tale of gods and goddesses, she sits in the corner with watered-down ale and stares into murky mirrors.  _ My mother was beautiful _ , she thinks with a sad sense of longing,  _ and father told me I would be, too. _

She thinks, for the first time, that her father was a liar. She is skinny and pale with rough hands and sharp cheekbones. Her lips are too big, her nose too long, and her eyebrows too sloped. Only her eyes, she suspects, will ever catch anyone’s favor. 

_ It is because they are like the sea, _ she tells herself, her desire for her father’s ship growing tenfold with every new whisper; her homesickness never waning with every new port.  _ So am I. _

  
  


 

“Why do you stay with me?” she asks John when they are thirteen. He is still small, but his muscles are growing strong with heavy work on the ship, and his baby features are giving way to that of a man’s. His eyes, the color of sapphires, meet hers as they walk past a boarded up shop that might have once sold crabs. “You had a good position on that ship.” 

John shrugs and smiles at her. “I don’t know.” It’s not really an answer, but it’s enough. Mari doesn’t like to know too much anymore. She fills her head with routes and whispers and dreams of her father’s ship. Too much extra, she suspects, will redirect the wind, changing her course again. For too long, sailor’s superstitions have haunted her every step.

_ My birth city _ , she thinks with bitterness laced with hate.  _ Again _ . Though her breasts are still small, barely buds, her desires are not and she’d sated them with the wrong sailor. Redhaired and freckle-faced with a large, bulbous nose and yellow teeth, she’d figured not even a whore would sleep with him for coin. Just her luck he isn’t bright enough to keep a sure thing by him. She finds herself hoping that the sailor’s cock rots off with pus as John charms their way into a tavern inn for the night. 

“Names?” the fat, tired-looking man with a shiny head asks them. His eyes are narrowed suspiciously. They both smell like salt and there are red bandanas wrapped around their heads, pulling back their hair. Their clothes are water-stained and old, but their purse is large. Like most greedy men, the promise of coin shuts up any concerns. 

“John and Mari Silver,” he replies.  _ Silver _ . Like his tongue. The name the men of the crew called him as he translated maps and codes and ledgers. They’d called her other names with mutters and curses and nursed wounds. Harder names. Darker. She’d minded them not. 

The innkeeper gives their hands a glance, looking for rings where there are none. They do not pass as brother and sister; she is too pale, where he is too tan, and they share no features. The action startles Mari, the realization that in this city she is a girl, and she will be treated as such. John rolls with it, grabbing her hand and the key and leading her up the stairs. It chafes and galls and she rips herself away as soon as they are out of sight, but she can feel society baring down with all its constraints as the days pass and no hope of leaving this cursed city again comes. 

Her dreams of the ocean come strong with each day her feet stay planted on land. The drowning comes back to her in the night and she finds herself mourning for it. Somewhere, she knows, her father waits down in the deep. Sailors call it the locker. A fearsome place beneath the waves and riptides that suffocates you and refuses liberty. She thinks of it as home.

John gets a job as a translator for a merchant of rugs. She’s hired by the innkeeper to distribute rum and ale and sing mournful shanties to drunks. People used to tell her that her voice is as tempting and haunting as a mermaid’s call and she uses it to her advantage, finally taking pages out of her friend’s books. Her tips roll in with each note and false smile; her goals now driftwood washed out to shore. 

_ One day _ , she tells herself,  _ I will set sail back along the waves. _

  
  
  


 

A year and six months later, she balls her fists around her sword and glares at the bleeding drunk who’d taken too many liberties with her now unconscious on a floor that reeks of piss and shit. “We have more than enough money,” she whispers to John harshly. Her throat is still raw and rough from screaming. “Let us leave this fucking city.” 

John shakes his head and she feels frustration rolling back and forth across every nerve. “I’m sick of this,” she screams, uncaring who hears. “The dirt and the still ground and the smell of excrement wherever I go. I’m sick of drunks and arrogant craftsmen’s apprentices pawing at my clothes and singing bawdy tunes, every night, to their jeers and winks.” She throws a purse of tips at her friend, clipping him in the face. Several gold coins spill across the cobblestones, landing in the pool of blood. The drunk has a deep cut on his forehead. He’ll probably bleed out, yet neither of them can seem to find it in themselves to care. John’s eyes follow the money as she rants. 

Emotions she’s been suppressing come out with the force of a hurricane. “Are you even listening?” She hits his arm and he winces, turning hurt blue eyes to her. “You’ve been quite content under that bleeding pig of a rugmaker, counting all the money you’ve saved, but every day, I have to hear some new pissant talk about ‘the Dread Pirate Roberts’ and the booty he’s stolen and the king’s men he’s murdered.” She kicks at the door of the inn with her broken leather boot. “Every night I hear them go on with wonder in their voices while I know he’s stolen my ship! My home!” 

“ _ Mariquita _ ,” he says, finally tearing his eyes away from the glint of gold. He holds out his hands to her. “I know. I understand.” 

“You don’t,” she protests. The body on the floor jerks next to her foot. Then it is still. “You don’t know what I feel” 

He smiles sadly and it reaches his eyes. Unmindful of her anger or her fists, he steps forward. “I do. I lost my home long before you did. I was on the streets for three years before your father took me in. I, too, want to go home. But how can we do that, Mari? How? I cannot fight and you are but one girl. They’re a crew of villains and cutthroats. We’d be food for the fishes before we even stepped onto the deck.” Then, he smooths her ragged, sweaty hair away from her face and kisses her forehead gently, taking her shaking body into a hug she hasn’t felt since her father died. 

She gasps and cries and pounds her fists against his chest. He is not as skinny as he once was, still thin, but there is muscle there, too, and she eventually sighs, placing her head against the beating of his heart. 

Later on, after the moon has retreated behind the clouds, the alley gives away no light except for the blue of their eyes and she says, “You know, you never did tell me why you got kicked off the ship. You’re brilliant. They should have kept you if they had any brains in their heads.” 

_ Not that they did _ , she thinks. John chuckles. He’s always been the sort to keep his secrets locked tight. “I bit the first mate. Deep, too. There was flesh in my mouth and it was vile. I can still taste it on my tongue. It was like fish fermented in the sand for  _ years _ .” A laugh replaces the tears and frustration and, when she pulls away, the corpse on the ground is a shock to her system. 

“Fuck,” she whispers. For all the dreams she has, the hangman’s noose has never featured in a one. Distantly, she knows she should feel something—more—but those feelings fail to come. John, too, looks at the corpse a bit askance, but with not a hint of guilt or remorse. Right now, the former drunk is a cannonball wrapped with a rusted chain around their legs. “What do we do?” Fear tinges her voice as it seizes her body, the air stolen from her lungs as if she is once again under the waves and drowning. 

John steels his shoulders and squares his jaw. It should make him look a man, but he is still half-a-boy. Nonetheless, he shoots a look to her and gestures for her to go back inside the inn where drunken men are singing out of tune and bar brawls shake the walls. 

“Go on,” he whispers. “Act  _ normal _ . Flirt even. I’ll take care of it.” There is fear in his voice, too, but determination in his eyes, and despite her misgivings, she acquiesces. 

Her eyes are raw and dry as she goes to bed on her hard, lumpy cot that night. The other side of her “marriage” bed in their so-called generous honeymoon suite of a two-by-two closest room is cold and she wraps the sheets around herself tight and pretends she is a barnacle clinging to the side of her father’s ship. “ _ Sailing far, far away, I will go, _ ” she sing-thinks, obscuring the worries in her head as she fights to capture phantom moments of sleep. 

  
  
  


 

A month later, Mari meets trouble in the form of Brennan Jones. She’s no stranger to flirting men who look at her with lust in their eyes and smirks on their wine-stained mouths. Sometimes, she even finds herself giving into bodily desires, on the nights when John is gone and there is nothing to calm the raging storm in her head. Most of the time, she sends them away with a pointed glare and a sharp tongue, hands pointing steel towards the back of the tavern.

There is a stain on the bar from perspiration and she scrubs at it furiously, ignoring the man as he comes to sit by the bar.  

“What’s a beautiful lass like you doing in a dive like this?” the handsome man with a trimmed beard and black hair asks with a good amount of charm.  _ Too much charm _ , she thinks and rolls her eyes. He’s leaning over the bar so that the collar of his shirt falls, buttons undone, to exposes his chest hair. He’s not the first tonight and neither will he be the last. 

She continues to wipe away the stain as he pops a cod fritter into his mouth while he waits. The persistent type. She hates them more than the others. Ignoring them never works. She tosses away the rag and disregards the flutter in her stomach as she meets his dark eyes. Everything about him screams neerdowell. There’s a gold hoop earring in his left ear and a bunch of rings that a man frequenting this inn could never afford legally on his fingers. The smell of rum is strong on his breath, too, and it must have been days since he’s last washed. 

“And your voice,” he says, running the rim of his square fingers around the rim of the tankard. “It’s equal I’ve never heard.” 

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she tells him in a flat tone. She reaches down underneath the bar and pulls out a bottle of cheap rum that tastes little better than poison. “Will you be paying a tab?” She slides it towards him. More drink means more tips, and the thought of the alley-corpse leaves her uneasy in a city that fishes up too many victims of drowned gods. They’ve got a pile of coin that can get them around the realms and back again if they so desire. At least once.  

If only she just convinces John. She spies him bounding down the stairs, tossing an apple back and forth in his hands. He smiles at her, but eyes the man in front of her with wariness as he approaches the bar. 

Oblivious, the man smirks and grabs the bottle. “The truth is not flattery,” he says. “Merely observation.” He tells her his name, then, as if she’d inquired. She frowns at him, but the way the candle light catches his face is alluring in a way that few men have a right to be. She’s never considered herself one to swoon over pretty things, but if there’s one thing she’s learned, it’s that exceptions are always around to be made. 

“All truths can be bought with drink and coin,” she tells him as John comes up and swipes a bottle of rum from behind the bar. The innkeeper doesn’t care, as long as she brings him customers and they keep paying rent. It’s been keeping them tipsy and happy for the last few weeks. “Which is yours?” 

John stands close to her, the very image of a protective brother, or the husband he pretends to be. None of the regulars ever seem to mind that they flirt with a perceived married woman. They’re all married men and in their minds vows are merely words, as mercurial as the ocean tides. Brennan, too, appears to be one of those men. He casts a quick glance to John with narrowed eyes, but then turns his sly smirk back to her. 

“Never coin, my lady,” he flirts. “Drink only allows a man the opportunity to say what is in his heart.” He places his hand on his chest and mimes beating with a finger tap. 

John snorts and mutters, “I doubt you have one,” but she elbows him to stop him from speaking louder. She banishes him with a fierce glare, because the last thing they need is trouble, and grabs the bottle back from Brennan. 

“And you, love?” Brennan asks as she downs a shot of rum. It burns like fire, but the warmth in her belly is worth it. “What is in your heart?” 

The drink makes her words sharp and her actions bold as she replies with a smirk the equal of his, “Are you hoping I’ll say  _ you _ ?” The sarcasm is heavy on her tongue. Lovestruck spotty cabin boys and rouge-faced whores cry about true love when they’re in their cups and drunks profess it for her if they’re inebriated enough, but Mari’s never believed in it. Happy endings are as fleeting as rain, and most interactions with people provide those seeking it with none. 

He leans closer until his lips are inches from hers and she can almost taste the air in his mouth. “Only if you desire that.” 

She drowns out the nightmares that night with the feel of his lips on her skin and their sweat making the motions of their bodies smooth as he thrusts, fast and rough, causing the bed to bounce. Her hair's a mess around the pillow, braids undone, and her eyes roll back in her head, the physical chasing away the intangible. She clutches him close like a lifeline with bites and scratches, desperate gasps of breath, and swallows his filthy words with kisses, his rough skin and scratchy beard scraping away the gnawing itch that just won’t go away since she saw the drunk-corpse. 

In the morning, she pries his heavy arm off her waist and rises with a glare and a kick to wake him. As he dresses, rubbing tired-eyes and a hungover head, he asks, “That man in love with you? The one with the curls?” It is absurd to think he almost sounds jealous. 

“No,” she scowls as she takes in her ripped blouse. She tosses it away from her in disgust, and then scratches her ear.  _ John does not look at me that way _ , she thinks,  _ he does not look at anyone that way _ . If true love exists, she ponders with sardonic amusement, then John’s is silver and gold. 

  
  
  


 

Brennan comes back every night and soon she finds his company a boon, as drink can only do so much to chase away the visions of blood and the dark dreams of the ocean's depths. Dark eyes and a cruel smirk flash behind her eyelids at night, and she wakes up with the phantom sensation of seaweed strung as a noose around her neck. In Mari’s dreams, she hangs from the docks, her corpse a side-show for men and sharks alike.

Men’s voices have also become fearful of late, as news of the Dread Pirate Robert’s path comes closer and closer to the city. He’s near, she knows, can feel it with every nerve and vein pumping blood inside her body; every inch of her  _ soul _ . The ship is a siren song endlessly calling her home. 

Her obsession is hard to hide, though Brennan’s ignorance leads him to other thoughts, voice taking on a needling tone as he tries to ply secrets from her with words when fingers and tongues in secret places fail. He’s got scars and cuts and bruises that she knows are ill-gained, but the desire to know the man he is does not come. He is a means to an end, nothing more. John doesn’t like it, but whether his glares are because she spends her nights with Brennan, or because she spends her mornings standing on the docks, he doesn’t reveal. 

She places her hand on her stomach, spreading her fingers across the span of it, and leans back against the wall. Her hair is long now, longer than it’s ever been. The ends reach to her waist and she controls its untamable nature by braiding it back with strips of red ribbons. 

Outside, the sea waves rush a melody against the sandy shore not far away and the gulls wail a hungry song. Brennan’s eye is bruised shut and black, a cut on his lip scabbed over for days, and his thumb is bent and stiff. He’s not paid his tab, she muses, or he’s got into trouble with a miscreant gang. Nearby, seventy leagues or so, the highland clans are once again at war. She thinks with no small amount of amusement that her erstwhile lover looks like he’s been through the precarious mountains and back with them. 

She doesn’t say it, though, and she knows that her expression doesn’t belay her thoughts. She is as motionless and still and cold as stone. 

“You’re a single-minded woman,” Brennan tells her one night. He is leaning up by one elbow and his bare chest is gleaming. 

“What else should I be?” she replies. The words are dry on her tongue.  _ I wear breeches as well as any man _ , she thinks,  _ but my fate will always be determined by the whims of my body.  _

She pictures her father’s ship sailing into shore, the vile first mate perched on the mast with his stolen cargo and his stolen vessel and his stolen hat. She presses her hand harder to her stomach and hums out loud, banishing the image and singing in her head, “ _ O come list a while, and you shall hear, by the rolling sea lived a maiden fair, her father had followed the smuggler trade, like a war-like hero. Like a war-like hero never afraid.”  _

He doesn’t reply, but that is not unusual. Theirs is not a relationship based on  _ conversation _ . 

The next night, she pays a witch who lives in the center of the city to bleed the life growing inside her out. The tea is bitter and scalding on her tongue. Though her stomach roils and her womb twists, the babe does not die. It lives. As determined as her. 

  
  
  


 

She doesn’t mean to tell him, but he finds out anyway and, to her befuddled disgust, there is some honor in the scoundrel. He gets on his knees, though he has no ring, not even a flower to offer, and holds a bottle of drink in his clenched fists as he asks, “Will you marry me?” Her heart sinks deeper than the baby nestling in her womb, but the innkeeper has made it clear that if the babe is not her “husband’s,” then she cannot stay longer. With Brennan sprouting to any willing ear that can hear the state of her circumstances, poor John comes out looking like a cuckold.

Her friend grins and tries to play it off with a wink and a smile, but she can see the worry in his eyes. It is this, more than the desperation of her situation, that makes her say yes. She feels regret as soon as the word leaves her mouth, but Brennan’s mouth is rough against hers and, like usual, the physical is chasing away her inner demons and she shuts them off. She’s not a brilliant liar, but she pretends well enough with him, a man too drunk to know better. 

The day before she gets married, she steps among the stalls of fish sellers and carts of clams and sways as if she’s back on the deck of a ship. The smell of the sea and the sound of the waves is a comfort to her frantic nerves. “ _ Now, in sailor’s clothing Jane did go _ ,” she sings to young patrons for coin close to the docks alongside a random deckhand who plays a fiddle to her tune. “ _ Dressed like a sailor from top to toe her aged father was the only care o this female smuggler. Of this female smuggler who never did despair. _ ” 

The sea chimes along with gentle waves, the very definition of the sirens’ call. It tells her one word: home. And then, it is whispering her  _ true _ name. 

On her wedding day, the temple priestesses don themselves in white silk and golden veils and raise their hands to the skies and down to the ground, chants like melodies filling Mari’s ears, before they wrap a rope of rough, knotted cord around her wrist, tying her to Brennan’s. Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees a priestess with curves so generous that even shapeless gowns can not hide them step forward and she feels a shiver go straight down her spine. 

She wears no gown of her own, only black breeches and a stained work-blouse, and Brennan’s little better. To their two witnesses, John and some pissant friend of her new husband’s, they must look a sight. Her eyebrows furrow as she sees a strange look pass between Brennan and John, and despite herself, a strange suspicion pricks. 

Her despair grows the second Brennan passes out from drink that night and she stares into the dark, straining to hear the song of the sea over her silent tears. 

The day after she gets married, she weighs her pockets down with stones and stands at the edge of the sea she’s been too cautious to enter since the day she drowned. Her bare feet crinkle the sand between her toes as she steps, first against dry grains, then sinking into wet, her legs coated by it, and then she is running, running towards the waves and the drift and she thinks  _ maybe I’ll float back home _ , but then arms are around her, pulling her away, always away, and she screams and kicks and flails while a familiar, lilting voice that has no brogue curses in a foreign tongue. 

“What the hell,  _ mariquita _ ?” John screams with terror in his voice. His eyes are wide and his pretty face frozen in a mask of shock. “What are you doing?”

She wrenches herself away from him, kicking sand and shells and baby crabs away with her feet. “I know what you did.” Confusion flits across his face, before awareness sets in. “He told me. He told me that’s how he knows about the babe!” She rears back and punches John. His curls fly, and her knuckles protest, but the anger is too strong. 

“ _ You _ told him to marry me,” she says accusingly. He doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. “Why?” She stings from this betrayal more than she has since she lost her father’s ship. She is fifteen and all she knows are lies.

“Because I thought it would save you,” he tells her with earnest blue eyes but his words are false to her ears. “Do you think this is any kind of life for a child? I am helping you.”

“No, Juan,” she tells him. She hasn’t used his real name in years. “You are trapping me.” A sob rips through her and suddenly, she no longer sees her childhood friend. 

“Get out of my sight,” she screams and brandishes her knife. The baby seems to makes her slow as she chases him. “I never want to see you again.” 

Her eyes, blurry with tears and rage, watch his black curls fade into the distance before they are drawn to the harbor where her father’s ship, as beautiful and grand as the day she was torn from it, is docked. It’s sails are dark, it's wood a deep, gleaming brown, and the harpy figurehead can be seen only by its varnished side. Cries catch in her throat as she sinks to her knees in the sand, huddled into the fetal position with her arms hugging her waist. 

  
  
  


 

The babe comes on the night of the worst storm the city’s seen in a  _ century _ . It is like the very waters and waves are protesting his fight into the world as he rips through her womb, sending shockwaves of pain through her back and chest and soul. Her brow is sweaty, her hair drenched and frizzy, her legs shaking, and her hands are wrapped tight around an amulet the midwife gave her. Her husband is off to the gods only knew where as the shore houses and inns and shops are crumpled to driftwood ruins under the power of the storm. 

As dawn breaks, Liam Jones is born, squinty-faced and squalling with strong lungs. The midwife hands him to Mari and she stares at the babe she’s carried within her like an anchor for nine long months, numb. She doesn’t watch as they burn the placenta or cut the cord, doesn’t hear when her husband bounds in with wild cheers and excuses. She only stares and thinks,  _ well, at least his eyes are blue _ . 

He is a bright boy, one to bring any natural mother pride. He sits and toddles and walks early, and his light brown hair charms all those who see it. He says his first word before he’s a year, and his manner is calm and placid. _He is a lake_ , she thinks, _or perhaps a pond. He will never have the rage of the sea inside him_. The storm, despite it all, was not a prophecy of birth. She does not know where he came from, for neither she or Brennan have characteristics as charming as their son’s. 

It’s easy to distance herself from the baby most days since she spends them singing to crowds on the docks and selling fish by the pound. Brennan’s work is a fantasy—an occurrence that never happens. She’d thought like a woman and married the lout for security, but in the end, she does that all by herself. 

At night, she feeds and rocks her son, but she never kisses his brow. When he cries, she soothes him to stop the sound. She never cuddles him or dances with him, singing the songs in her heart.  _ If there is any mother as terrible as me that has ever lived, I cannot conceive of it _ , she thinks to herself one night. 

So she tries. She tries to kiss him, but he calls out “papa” and her heart squeezes. She makes his favorite biscuits in the mornings, but he waits for his father to eat them. She takes his chubby hands and dances with him when he’s eighteen months, but he falls and cries that he doesn’t want to continue. 

Then comes the morning she wakes to find her boy in the kitchen corner, a pout on his face and snot trailing down almost to his lips. There is a large, yellow bruise wrapping around his arm, and a broken bottle near the stove. She cries out and scoops him up, clutching him close as he fights her with weak, little fists, and deposits him on the bed to sweep the jagged glass. 

She throws a mug at the bastard’s forehead as he stumbles in that night, wine-stained and drenched with rum. Angered, his hand strikes her faster than many a drunk man, sending her crashing down to the broken floorboards, but she is not cowed. She rears up and juts out her left leg, sending him flying onto his arse, and makes a grab for the table. 

“Hit me again,” she says with her sole kitchen knife raised threateningly. “And you’ll be waking up with less cock and balls.” He cringes back as he rises, clutching a chair for support. 

Liam is crying in the corner and the letch moves towards the sniveling toddler. She steps around him, blade glinting from the light of the fire, and stands a wall of rage in between him and her son. “And if you raise a hand to him,” she hisses as she remembers the fingerprint bruise on her child’s chubby arm. “You’ll lose them as well.”  

Brennan is arrested the next morning for fixing a bet with a wealthy merchant, but she gets him out by promising favors to a homely guard, all at the behest of her son. 

  
  
  


 

By the time Mari is twenty, she’s forgotten the feel of the water against her skin. Liam splashes in the shallows of the beach, running around with happiness as he chases seagulls, and she watches from the sand. The Dread Pirate Roberts never returns and, slowly, she resigns herself to a purpose unfinished and muses that the driftwood will never return to the waves. If there are days that she shuts off, closes herself away from her son and his needs, and dreams of her life on her father’s boat, or remembers the blood of the drunk-corpse and imagines the first mate in his place, they are fewer and farther between. 

Liam is a lonely child, however, for although the neighborhood boys play with him, his mother is a lowly dock-singer and he is not fit company in the homes of many. Entertaining enough under the shadow of the moon as her skirt sways and her feet dance, her words a mournful lament or a cheery bawd, but in the light of day, the townspeople’s tongues turn to shame and slurs. His father, too, is no better, but Liam’s not yet grasped the sins of the man he adores. 

Occasionally, they pass those who used to frequent the tavern inn and some whisper that her marriage is a farce, that she’s shacked up with a louse and her true husband wept away into the waves of shame. Though she and John told everyone they’d never been married, many still insist that he was only trying to save her from the shame. Brennan grows dark and dangerous every time this happens, anger flashing in his eyes, insults of “barmaid slut” following him from whorehouse to whorehouse. 

Her son grows quiet, and she grows colder. By the time he’s six, she’s had five miscarriages and her bones grow prominently under her thin skin. After the third, her relief at not baring her worthless husband another babe turns to crushing disappointment. She buries herself in chores; scrubs the dishes until her wrists are red and cracking, brushes her floor till the sand and dirt are memories on the wind, and dances until her feet blister and bleed to try and coax a smile out of her reflection. 

She is so lonely, though, and it cloaks itself around her like nothing ever has. It settles in deep and rooted, as if the seaweed that once tangled her small feet and dragged her to the depths of the locker, are tied into knots caging this feeling into her bones. Her only acquaintances are the loose-tongued baker’s wife and an old spinster who gives her scarves and blankets for half-the-price, while her husband spends his nights in taverns with pox-ridden whores in his lap and weeks in the wind. Her soul keens at the thought of John every time she spies little boys with black curls and sticky fingers during her morning walks with Liam, and she misses her childhood friend like a sharp edge; as close to her now as her grief for her father has turned into a dulled edge with the years. Though she convinces herself they stuck together through mutual necessity, she knows that she will never again feel a friendship quite like she’d shared with John. 

So, she visits the temples and lights candles under the watchful gaze of the silent priestesses, wary of something she can not name, but steeling herself all the same, and pictures the waves as she prays for another child. 

  
  


 

She is twenty-three and feels as ancient as a crone the day John Silver sails back into her life with a crew searching for gold and living by a pirate code, fleeing from an island called Treasure Island. 

“So,” she says with crossed arms and a scowl as he sits across from her in her kitchen, minus a leg and with lines bleached into crinkles around his eyes from the sun. In a clipped tone, she continues, “You live on a ship. As a pirate. How—ironic.” He looks down in shame, while his captain, Flynn or something or other, stares at her questioningly. He’s older, with ginger hair and a ginger beard, and there are untold stories in the depths of his eyes. The tall, handsome blonde behemoth standing behind the two men rolls his eyes as if her anger towards her childhood friend comes as no shock. 

In truth, she is only pretending. Her anger’s faded, and now she only wants to hold him close and whisper to him she’s sorry and ask him about his life. Her pride stops her, but a grin flits across her face unbidden, nonetheless, and soon he, too, is smiling. Though her dreams are still of the sea, her desire for vengeance strong as a hundred-foot wave crashing back down, there is a measure of strange peace with her life she’s gained through time.  _ Or, perhaps, it is simply complacency _ , she thinks, as Brennan falls in with vomit staining his beard and glares at the three men. 

“Why should we house these criminals?” Brennan spits out later after their tale and purposes have been told. He is glaring at John. Billy Bones bristles, though Captain Flint looks resigned, while John’s fists are clenched and she wonders if he’s learned how to fight. 

“Why should I house you?” she asks him, instead, in a prim and proper tone of voice. 

That night, she and John go to a tavern in the center of the city despite the pained grimace his wooden leg brings to his face and she reveals in his company. He gifts her with a ring set with a ruby that he claims a witch gave to him after he’d left, saying it would always keep him safe. “Take it,” he tells her. “I think you need it more.” There is something dark in his voice now, a tainted tinge that’s never been there before. 

Even after their murder. After all these years, she can finally admit it for what it was. She waits to feel remorse, but still it never comes. 

She feels happier than she has in years and the only regret she knows is that he cannot stay. That night, Brennan slams a bottle onto the floor and takes her roughly, her face down against the pillow. As she moans and gasps, the rhythm of their bodies the only way they fit, she hopes that this time seed will take. 

A month later, their time has come and ended. John leaves her regretfully and she thinks she might spy tears in his eyes, though more likely those are her own. He folds a piece of paper into the palm of her hand and kisses her knuckles, unmindful of Brennan’s scowl, and whispers, “For you. When you’re ready. Goodbye,  _ mariquita _ .” 

Billy Bones nods respectfully, addresses her as ma’am, and ruffles her son’s hair, before 

he steps out the door to follow his crew member.

“I can take you away from here,” Flint offers. “I do not hold the same follies as superstitious men. Silver’s told me you’re a fine fighter.” 

She smiles at him. “Thank you, Captain,” she says. She presses her hand against her stomach and spreads her fingers wide across. “But a ship and a battle is no place for a babe. And I think that you will see much blood before you are done.”  

After they leave, Brennan disappears and Liam pouts. Captain Flint’s turned into a hero, a former navy man who’s travelled the world, and Liam wants to grow up to be a man “just like him.” 

Her world grows darker, after that, and for nine months, the sea dreams grow stronger. With the quickening of the babe in her womb, it is like the siren call has been renewed, and she can see seaweed even with her waking eyes now, and in her dreams, a cloaked figure hovers over her floating body on the ocean floor, with skeletal hands and black fingers, a familiar ship above it on the waves. She wakes with gasps and shakes and her cries cause Brennan to seek respite in other beds. 

When she’s seven months along, she looks at the present John left her. Her heart grows numb and her hands slacken around the parchment as she looks at the list of places the Dread Pirate Roberts has been. Flint knows him, of course, and he’s been tracking him for a long time.  _ If you ever want help,  _ John writes in tiny, looping scrawl at the bottom,  _ know that we will be by your side. _

She bites her lips red with blood as she holds the piece of paper to the flame of the candle on her table, her little babe’s legs playing a foot-tapping game with her innards. 

The day Killian is born she is twenty-four and the sea is calm and the sky is blue. He comes out with a red-face and squinting, just like his brother, and a healthy set of lungs. His fists beat at the air, grasping for his mother, as he gazes about with sea-blue eyes. Liam stands at the edge of the bed, looking down at the babe with fascination, and Brennan is slumped in the chair. He picks himself up with a sigh when she glares at him to come over and observe their second son. 

“You have never been happy with me,” Brennan says to her, looking away from the babe. Liam doesn’t even react, too fascinated by his new brother. She, however, is slightly shocked at the lack of scorn. “Do not lie. You regret that you are my wife.” 

“Yes,” she admits to him. “I regret that I am your wife. But you gave me some happiness.” The newborn’s warmth is solid in her arms, his mouth a firm bite against her nipple as he sucks his fill, and his black, fine wisps of hair a gentle tickle against her arm. That night she nestles him in the crook of her arm and dreams of a gray, watery abyss that she cannot name, and with it, a lone weeping blonde woman in a bright red jacket. 

  
  
  


 

Killian is  _ not  _ the type of son any mother would be proud of. There’s not a night he doesn’t scream through with his little lungs, preferring to be up with the stars. Mari spends many nights watching Liam with his pillow tucked around his ears attempting to drown out the sound of his little brother’s shrill cries while she bounces the small baby up and down. During the days, when Killian does sleep, she catches some herself, but more often than not, the curious babe finds himself drawn to trouble. He develops as quickly as his brother did, quicker even, which means she’s chasing him back home when he learns how to walk, and talking around dangerous situations when he inadvertently insults the neighbors.

Despite all this, she is proud of him, her little raging storm boy.  She finds the protective instinct she’s always heard mother’s possessed but rarely felt rearing up inside her around her second born. At two years old, her little boy is beginning to read letters with the help of his big brother and she thinks, if any traveling merchants come by, she’ll find him babbling with words she doesn’t know. 

“Is he even mine?” Brennan spits one night fueled only by spite, gesturing to the innocently sleeping Killian in the cot next to the bed. His black hair is like ink next to his pale skin. “Is he?” 

“Unfortunately,” she says spitefully back, rolling her eyes, before she grabs the bottle away from him and throws it straight into the fire. “So shape the fuck up.” 

To her husband’s credit, he  _ does _ try. For a month or two. He’s home at night at least two times a week, sometimes more, though he stinks of fermented yeast and sweat from lack of bathing and she desires nothing more than to banish him to the floor when he stumbles in after midnight. In the mornings, he eats breakfast with them and spins yarns for Liam while she glares at him over her cup of tea, a babbling babe in her arms. She smiles down at her son and runs her fingers through his black hair as he waves a piece of bread in his chubby fist. 

When her husband and son have gone, one off to “work” and the other to learn letters from a local man she’s paying for with a portion of her wages, she takes Killian down to the docks. During the lull in the times she sells merchandise, she takes his tiny hands and smiles as his face lights up with delight, the two of them spinning about the docks and singing. He’s off-key, but he’s time to learn yet, being just a toddler, and the townspeople find amusement in it as the little boy tries to sing, “ _ With her pistols loaded she went aboard. And by her side hung a glittering sword, in her belt two daggers; well armed for war was this female smuggler, was this female smuggler who never feared a scar. _ ” 

Killian is hers in a way that Liam never has been. Her first born often shrinks from her and looks to his usually absent father, clinging to the illusion of his love. She knows though, that her husband’s first, second, and third loves are the bottle. They are mere ornaments. Still, perhaps her older child can sense instinctively that his mother had sought to rid herself of him once, or maybe her son just doesn’t want to embrace the same coldness she exhibits that Killian finds comfort in. Nonetheless, a part of her feels resentment towards Liam’s favoritism. 

By the time Killian is three, she watches the boys as they swim in the shallows of the tide, both of them taking to the water as if they were born to it, their feet meant for kicking through the waves instead of standing steady on land, and she looks out into the horizon. As Kilian cries, “Mama! Mama, look, I’m a fish!” she thinks to herself,  _ I’m sorry, Papa _ . The sunset glitters reds and yellows and oranges against the blue water,  _ I’m sorry, but they’re more important than some planks of wood and bits of rigging and sails _ . 

The moon rises and the colors fade and she turns to watch as the priestesses make their way down the docks with alms in their hands and bread in their baskets, each holding lit candles. The uneasy feeling she never shakes around them builds and she runs to stop her boys, grabbing Liam by his wet arm and Killian around the waist, as they move to greet the women. As she pants, fingers slipping around her eldest’s arm, she glares from beneath her fringe at a curvy priestess she can see only from the side, and hauls the boys harshly away from the beach to the sound of mournful wave songs. 

No matter what she does, it seems, the sea never stops calling to her at night.

  
  
  


 

When Killian is five, she leaves him with Liam, admonishing him to make sure to watch out for his little brother, and hands her oldest son the ring John gave her. She loops it on a rusted, silver chain and places it around his neck, ruffling his hair and ignoring the stiff way he holds himself as she leaves to search for their worthless father. 

Mari looks for Brennan in the old tavern she’d worked at when they met. The innkeeper’s long passed, dead from the plague that swept through the city a couple of years ago—the one she’d prayed at the time would take her husband as well—and the new man who glares at her as she storms in behind the bar is young, with smooth skin, but a receding hairline. He recoils as she glares at him, standing with her hands on her hips as she takes in the drunks and exhausted looking sailors, as well as women of the night, crowding the room. As she looks, her ears can’t help but catch the sound of a name she’s tried not to think about since before Killian’s birth.

It’s a shock to the system, almost like she’s been downed in ice water, as she freezes, every muscle in her body seizing. Her breath catches in her throat as she listens to a man with a reedy voice tell his painted-faced companion, “They say he killed a quarter of his crew. Keelhauled them and left their bodies as food for the sharks.” The group surrounding the man, all nursing mugs of ale and worried expressions, shiver. 

The reedy-voiced man is wearing a navy uniform, indicating he’s a king’s man, though the shirt is ripped and stained with blood and there’s a harried glint in his eyes that makes Mari wonder if he’s a deserter. “Why?” a wide-eyed man with wrinkles housing deeper wrinkles on his face asks, terror in his voice. 

She moves closer, careful to look away from them as if she’s still searching, and not eavesdropping. “No clue,” the man replies. “There are rumors that there’s been disent for years. Something long-standing that some of the crew couldn’t abide. Whatever it was, the rest of the crew rooted the rebels out.” A pang goes through her as she listens, her stomach twists, and absurdly she wonders if  _ she _ is the cause of dissent.

_ Don’t be stupid _ , she chides herself, though she finds herself almost fondly remembering the cook who snuck her extra rations during their voyages,  _ none of the crew lifted a finger to help you that day.  _

The whore on the navy man’s lap snorts, a sound reminiscent of a hog. “Any man that refers to himself as the dread is compensating for something. Why are you all so frightened of him?” Several men turn disparaging looks to her, shaking their heads and calling her a fool. 

The reedy voice turns to a whisper, then, and Mari almost doesn’t catch his next words. “Because rumor has it he’s coming here. Looking for something.” Dramatically, the man pauses. “Or someone.” 

The barkeep shouts about damages and payments as she rushes out of the tavern, the thoughts in her head turning into a messed-up knot, words confused and direction flitting every which way. Her heart beats fast as she runs past startled couples fucking in alleys and old women clutching their chests, the only clear focus she can grasp that of home. Her feet and her mind never stop to grasp why she’s running, or who she is running  _ from _ , but she can hear the siren call of the sea rushing in her ears and the pull, then the repellency, of the waves sends her rushing back to her sons. 

As she crashes into the small flat with a bang and a cry of “Liam! Killian!” her feet skid across the floor, boots catching in the broken parts of the wood, and her heart stops at the sight that greets her. Instinctually, her hand makes a grab for the dagger she keeps on her cinching belt, the familiar hilt of the blade clutched in her palm. 

There is a strange, voluptuous woman holding Killian in her lap. She’s got long, dark hair and dark, cruel eyes and her thin fingers are combing through her boy’s hair. There is a sharp parody of a smile stretching her thin, chapped mouth. 

“Who are you?” she says darkly. She grips her dagger tight in her hand. “What do you want? Let my son go.” Her heart pounds as she looks for Liam, finding her eldest passed out on the bed, dead to the world. The only indication he lives are the snores and the rise and fall of his chest. She looks around for cups of tea or draughts that could have been used to make her son sleep so, but finds nothing. Everything is exactly how she left it. 

“I will not harm your son,” the woman says. “Or you. I’ve come to help you, my love.” She places the boy back onto the floor and he runs over to his mother. Mari reaches down and scoops him up with desperate arms, clutching him close to her chest. Even though he melts into her, always happy to be near his mama, her son is far from afraid. The woman rises with a smooth motion, and then, with a wave of her hand, the door closes behind Mari. Killian’s eyes go wide with excitement, though Mari swears her heart stops beating. 

“Are you the Dark One?” the little boy asks and for a few long, terrifying moments as she contemplates a way to get to a sleeping Liam and then to safety, she fears that her son is right.  _ A parlor trick _ , she tells herself as an effort to calm her racing thoughts.  _ There is someone outside the door _ . 

The woman laughs with a sound that seems like the trill of a dolphin and shakes her head. “No, child. My name is Calypso,” she tells him with the same sharp, strange smile. A shiver races down Mari’s spine at the excited noise her son makes, as well as the syllables of the name, wrapping themselves around her bones like a barnacle clings to ships. 

She pushes this away, and answers with skepticism. “The sea goddess?” 

“The very same.” 

“Lady, you’ve had too much rum,” she tells her. She never lowers the dagger. Drunks are dangerous, experience gained long before she trapped herself with her marriage chain. And a drunk is all she can be, for Mari refuses to believe her. She  _ can’t _ believe her. The gods never visit mere mortals to chat and have tea and smile piercingly at little boys. 

“Oh, my dear,” the woman says and then Mari’s hand is empty, the dagger resting in the other woman’s right hand. Mari swallows and backs towards the door, dragging her son along with her. As her back hits wood and her hand fumbles for the doorknob, the woman drifts closer, but she’s not walking, she’s  _ floating _ in the air. A hand comes up to caress her face in a foreign, seemingly motherly gesture and Mari clenches her teeth, fingers tightening protectively around her son. “There is so much you should have done.” The woman steps back and, with a sharp giggle, says, “No matter. You soon will.” 

Steeling herself, she says, “What game is this?” Her eyes drift to her sleeping, oblivious son as she moves away from the door towards the counter where she’s prepared meals for years. There are bulbs of garlic and bushels of herbs placed there, and hidden behind them is her lone kitchen knife. It’s not sharp, but she hopes that it will be enough. 

The woman turns a mocking smile on her, sitting back down in the chair with a flourish. She has sharp teeth, reminding Mari of a carnivorous fish. She holds her hands up and places her fingers together, her talon like nails curving around one another in a strange pantomime vision of a small cave. 

“Have you ever heard the story of the nymph, Thetis?” the self-proclaimed goddess says, startling Mari. She shakes her head and moves to cover her son’s ears, weary and concerned by the woman’s nattering, but he swats them away and looks at the woman with wide, guileless eyes. Her boy loves tales, and so Mari finds herself trapped with an enraptured audience as she tries to subtly make her way to the knife. “One of fifty sisters, she loved her son Achilles so much that she could not bare the loss of his mortal life. And so, she dipped him in the water of the River Styx, turning his body from frail to nigh on invulnerable. Every inch of it, except for the heel in which she held him in the water. It remained mortal. A weakness. Achilles died, and Thetis mourned, but the tale lives on.” 

“And your point?” Mari asks. She has no time for nonsense and myths coated with honeyed-words. She wants this woman gone  _ now _ . 

The woman turns to her son and grins at him with all of her sharp teeth. Still, her brave little boy shows no fear. “Do you know, lad?” Mari wants to scream at the woman not to address her son, not to even look at him, but she needs to keep attention away from herself. 

The little boy frowns thoughtfully, his lips drawn into a pout. “To get rid of weaknesses?” he answers in a timid voice, unsure of his own answer. The woman laughs with brittle sounding delight, sending another shiver down Mari’s spine. 

“Clever boy,” the woman says, petting her son’s head. “You’re a special child. Like your mama.” As Mari’s hand grasps the kitchen knife, suddenly, with a puff of smoke that looks like  _ water _ , the woman is in front of her, grabbing her wrist and twisting it until she drops the blade with a pained moan. Then, her stomach rolls and her dinner threatens to make a reappearance as the ground disappears underneath her feet. When she comes to, she is on her knees, sand scratchy upon the skin of her palms, and her mouth tastes bitter and acidic. The sound of the waves hits her with a bang, the smell of the salt and the wind sharp and comforting, even in a moment she thinks is the most terrifying experience of her life. They beckon her with their familiar siren call.  

“What the fuck was that?” she says as she gathers her bearings, pushing the sea to the back of her mind. It’s hard to do since she’s at the beach, her sons nowhere to be seen. “What the fuck did you do?” 

“Oh, honey,” the woman says with a voice dripping with patronization. “Magic.” She raises an eyebrow as if it should be obvious, but Mari’s never met a witch in her life that can just make people appear in once place they hadn’t been before. As if she’d said this aloud, the woman laughs mockingly and responds, “Well, dear, I  _ am _ a god. This type of magic is strong to mere mortals, but to  _ me _ ? As easy as a babe shaking a rattle.” 

“What do you want with me?” she asks again. She feels as if she is balancing on the precipice of something. Anything. Yet, there’s a strange war going on inside her as she waits. She’s trapped between the need to go back to her sons, make sure they’re safe as she pictures Killian scared and frightened, attempting to wake up his sleeping brother, and the need she’s had for the sea since almost before she can remember. It’s as deep, deeper, than the dream of the return of her father’s ship, the one she’d locked away tight and tried to forget. 

The woman provides her no answer. Instead, she says, “All magic comes with a price, dear.” 

“I don’t understand,” she can’t help but admit, though it grates on her to do so. 

“All magic comes with a price, darling,” the woman repeats, and suddenly, curiosity blooms in Mari despite the anger and fear and confusion. And suddenly, though she knows intellectually the thought is absurd, she thinks she  _ recognizes  _ this woman. The face is the same, twenty years later, down to the dark eyes. 

“You healed me as a child,” she whispers faintly, heart pounding against her chest. She thinks of the little girl she was, then, and pictures the woman she is now, almost thirty with crow’s feet around blue eyes and hair that’s never tamed. 

The woman smiles sharply and nods, clapping her hands and bouncing. “Finally, she’s onto something.” Mari backs away, shoes making impressions in the sand. 

“Why?” she asks, stuck in the impossibility of it all. This woman should be an old crone. None of this should be happening. But she knows, despite everything, that this is no dream. 

The woman waves her hand with an air of boredom. “Your father paid me. And I was—” The woman pauses and Mari believes she’s going to say bored, but then, she whispers, “—intrigued.” 

“Why?” she asks again. She’s not sure if she wants to know what had intrigued the woman or why she’d healed her or a million other thoughts that are racing through her brain. “Why are you here now? Twenty-something years is a long time to keep quiet.” 

_ You’re beginning to believe this woman _ , Mari thinks to herself with disbelief,  _ this is _ —

She doesn’t know what it is. 

With a savagery that surprises her, Calypso grabs her tight and turns her around, forcing her to feel the water against the bare skin of her calves. “You want to go in,” she whispers in her ear, pulling strands of hair away. “You  _ need _ it. When you were carrying that first boy, you knew he was a weakness. He would keep you from your  _ home _ . The sea was what you desired and you knew you had to go back to it. You’ve just forgotten.” 

“You’re insane,” Mari protests as she tries to uselessly wrench herself out of the woman’s hold. She feels like she’s caught in a riptide with no means of escape. The woman kisses her ear, sending a shiver down her spine. 

“No, no, no, darling,” is the response. “You know my words are true.” With a jolt, the goddess launches Mari away from her. “Your father thought he was bargaining with his own life that night. Really, he was bargaining with yours.” Salt sprays her in the face, filling her mouth and soaking her hair. It burns her eyes as she scrambles away from the water. “One day, you won’t resist the call.” Then, Calypso is kneeling down, grabbing fists of her hair tight in hand and forcing Mari to look to the distance where a ship with black sails is making its way to port. “And I think that day will be soon.” 

She releases her and Mari falls forward, sputtering and gasping. As the goddess disappears, the waves seem to come together into a haunting song, filled with impossible words, “ _ Now they had not sailed far from the land, when a strange sail brought them to stand. ‘These are sea robbers,’ this maid did cry, ‘but the female smuggler, the female smuggler will conqueror or will die. _ ”

  
  
  


 

Brennan Jones, louse and drunk and vagabond that he is, is absent during the last few days of Mari’s life, though the thought only occurs to her seconds before breath leaves her body. The few days before that, ignorant as she is of her fate, she finds herself relieved that she doesn’t have to deal with his pitiful presence as she tries to process the strange occurrence. Liam listens to Killian’s tale with the air of an older, wiser man placating his baby brother’s playful illusions, and she pretends as if everything is still normal.  

The ground shifts and rocks beneath her feet as she sells fish at the market, though. Her sons’ blue eyes make her dream of the ocean, and the smell of salt in stews and fish and all manner of things makes her mouth water. When her father’s ship docks, she dares to venture as far as she can towards it, feeling the tug and pull that’s been calling her make her bold, and she recognizes a few faces. If they recognize her, wrapped in a shawl and old as she is now, she doesn’t know, but a few men stop and stare at her as they get on and off the ship. A man with black curls makes her thoughts turn to John and Captain Flint and their offer of help, but she brushes it aside. He’s got enough problems of his own. She will not drag him into the strangeness that has become her life. 

“Mama,” Killian says, breaking her from her thoughts. Absentmindedly, she squeezes her baby boy’s hand. “Are we going on a ‘venture?” He, too, is staring at the ship and the men around them, though with fascination and not anger.  

She smiles at him and runs her free hand through his black hair. “One day, my love,” she whispers fondly. “One day.” 

As they move to retreat for the day, she catches sight of a familiar hat perched on a man’s head. Their eyes meet over the railing of the ship and her spine straightens as they stand, locked in a silent battle of wills, and consider one another. A sharp grin stretches his lined mouth and, then, he reaches up and takes the hat off his head, flourishing it in a loop through the air as he bows. He recognizes her, she knows, though there’s no reason she should. She nods her head in response with a jerk, gritting her teeth and represses a rude gesture back.

_ Fuck you _ , she thinks as she leaves.  _ Fuck you to the dark, haunting depths of the locker.  _

Liam is scowling at a map he’s got laid out on the table when they get home. Next to him is a cup of cold looking tea, the leaves dregs on the surface of the liquid, and a crust of bread that looks harder than it should. Her boy’s working as a sweeper at the local mapmaker’s, but he’s been trying to learn how to chart them all of his own. Usually, she finds him nearly pulling his light brown hair out of his own scalp from frustration. 

She unwraps her shawl and hangs it on the hook as she closes the door, Killian bouncing over to his brother, feet tracking wet sand onto the floor. “Liam!” he cries cheerfully. A grin stretches his pale, chubby cheeks which causes the annoyed look to melt away from his older brother. “Mama says we’re going on an ‘venture soon.” 

Liam’s eyebrow raises skeptically as he eyes his mother over his little brother’s head. “Did she?” he says. She wonders how her boy grew so suspicious. Most of her wants to blame Brennan, but she knows that she is no innocent party here. 

“I said one day,” she tells him. “Or do you want to stay here forever, navy boy?” She’s teasing, but her son’s eyes grow wide. He’s been hiding his interest in joining the king’s men from both her and his father, but keeping pamphlets under a cot is no true hiding place. 

A knock on the door makes her blood freeze to ice in her veins, and Liam stop the answer he was about to give, mouth left open. Killian remains unafraid and unaware, the little boy lifting himself up on his tiptoes to look at the map. 

“Li—” he starts to say when the door bursts open. 

She barely has enough time to register the chaos. One second she is standing near the door with tense muscles, the next a large man with arms the size of a whale has her backed up against the counter, his elbow pressed into her windpipe. Liam’s backed up into the corner with his brother in his arms, while another man, heavily scarred with a receding hairline, moves towards the boys. His cutlass isn’t even drawn, seemingly confident he can handle two young boys. She screams, shrill and loud, hoping beyond anything that someone passing will hear, but her face snaps back as the man slaps her. 

“Quiet, lass,” the man says. Blood wells up in her mouth and she spits, cursing. She recognizes him. He’s the bosun from her father’s crew. The years have done nothing to decay his muscles—or his cruelty. There’s a lecherous grin she recalls from her childhood cragging the lines of his mouth and his rough hands are traveling over her. She grits her teeth and spits blood at him. 

“Get the hell off my mother,” Liam yells. There’s a thump and she finds herself wishing that now isn’t the time her eldest decides he wants to attempt being a hero. She can hear her little one whimpering, now, afraid for the first time in his life, and this gives her all the incentive she needs to feel around the table, looking for the knife she left there in the morning.

“Shut up, boy,” the other man says with a throaty growl. “Or it won’t be just your mama.” This sends a surge of anger through her, especially once the cold feeling of metal touches her skin. She grips it tight, muscles tense and ready to spring, every inch of her a waiting predator, while the bosun continues to have his fun, and waits. 

The next moments are just as chaotic as the first. Liam’s no shrinking wallflower, and she sees from the corner of her eyes as he tries to take down the assailant in front of them. The man flicks him off at first, going towards her screaming younger child, but Liam’s on his feet again, jumping up and clinging like a limpet to the man’s back, trying to hang on and choke him out at the same time. This distracts the bosun enough to allow her to bring out the knife and in a smooth motion she slices it, deep and jagged, across the vulnerable flesh of his adam’s apple and across his throat. 

She pushes the body away from her just as the other man flings Liam off him once again. Rage fills her as she stalks forward at a run. Colliding, the man’s hands reach out to grab her tight around the waist, but she strikes anyway. Unlike Calypso, this man does not have the benefit of shiny, magical powers and she stabs the knife deep into his gut, twisting it to the sound of his pained groans. “Run!” she tells Liam, who scoops up his wide-eyed brother, feet flying out the door. She kicks the groaning man away from her, his numb hands letting go of her waist, and leaves him to bleed out. If Brennan comes home, he’ll be in for a shock, but the thought only briefly flutters through her mind as she makes off after her children. 

Captain Roberts is far from stupid, so she watches as her boys weave their way around yelling citizens as several rough-looking pirates attempting to catch them. She slips away from a few herself, to their disgust as she hears them curse and shout, but her heart lodges itself in her throat as she watches three men begin to pursue her boys down the beach. They’re running near the water. The waves are strong and fast, crashing and churning, too strong for a child to enter, so she cries out, motioning with her arms. This startles several townspeople out of their apathy, a few mothers with children gasping with their hands held over their mouths, and a couple of men make off in pursuit of the criminals. 

She bends down, stumbles, then straightens and continues to run, dipping into the sand, and throws her left shoe at one of the men. It hits him in the head, but not hard enough, and her boys are too near the water. 

“Liam! Killian!” 

She can barely hear over the haunting cry of the waves, so she knows that neither can they. One of the men catches Liam by the arm, jerking him away from the water, which causes him to lose his grip on his little brother. She cries as she watches the waves crash, sending the little boy underneath, one hand sticking out in the air for a mere second before it is caught in the violence of the water. The pirates and the men stop, but she kicks off her other shoe into the sand, heedless of the shouts and yells, and then she is diving into the water.

It hits her  _ hard _ . She flies back, head knocking onto the sand and the air rushing over her face, before the water crashes on top of her again. She raises her arms, struggling through the deep, salt stinging her eyes as she opens them. Her lungs are burning. 

_ There _ . He’s spinning, attempting to right himself and bring himself up for air, but the current is too strong. It slams past her once more, she drifts further from him, but she kicks forward, trying in vain to swim faster, harder, stronger. 

His eyes are closed, but her fingertips just reach him, and she feels his desperate hand grab onto hers. The ground meets her feet as the water retreats and she pushes upwards, gaining momentum, breaking the water. One of the men has followed her in and she sees him trying to make a grab for the two of them, but she doubts his strength. Water caught in her throat, she pushes her son to him, hoarsely screaming, “Go. Take him!” She pushes at him, spurring the man on. Before the water comes back again, she catches a glimpse of Liam on the shore being restrained by several men. 

Then, she is being tugged and pulled. She is driftwood, floating away from the beach and back into the deep. The water is still churning and roiling, but calm is beginning to take hold. Through the stinging blurriness of her eyes, she sees the man’s legs disappear from the water, and she knows he’s made it back to the shore. She’s farther and farther away now, the sound of the waves in her ears a sweet, lovely dirge. Fish swim past her, sending a brief, warm tickle of wave past her skin. 

She tries to gasp for air once, then twice, but she’s too deep. Her head is foggy, and the desperation is a distant memory. 

And then she is not alone.

There is a naked woman in front of her. Bubbles float as she tries to open her mouth to scream, watching as those cruel, cold dark eyes glitter with triumph and amusement. Pain, sharp and vicious and worse than anything she’s ever felt, bursts through her chest cavity. Something pulls and rips and tears, all while her lungs burn and her mind grows faint, and then—

It stops. In Calypso’s hand is a bright, deep red object, glowing and pulsing, and somewhere in the murkiness of her mind she recognizes it for what it is. A heart.  _ Her _ heart. In a moment, the object is out of Calypso's hand, floating down slowly until it disappears beyond where Mari’s faint, dim eyesight can see. 

As she blacks out, she feels cold, slimy arms wrap themselves around her, curves pressed against her thin frame, and she makes out the sounds of the sea’s song in the woman's whispers. Her name. Her  _ real _ name. As the oxygen leaves her brain she spares one last thought to her sons, and then everything goes blank.

She is twenty-nine years old the day she finally drowns. 

**Author's Note:**

> The backstory in here gives Killian a country/realm to have come from right outside the Enchanted Forest. (Accents are a thing and I have regional theories). The underage warnings are there for modern conceptions of it, but within this universe, just like the 17th century, the ages fit the time period. This is part of an ongoing series in which Emma Swan will be a main character.


End file.
